I have reported on health for most of my career. My work as an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register exposed problems with the fertility industry, the trade in human body parts and the use of illegal drugs in sports. I helped create a first-of-its-kind report card judging hospitals on a wide array of measures for a story that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I was one of the lead reporters on a series of stories about lead in candy, a series that also was a finalist for the Pulitzer.For the Center for Health Journalism (previously known as Reporting on Health), I have written about investigative health reporting and occasionally broke news on my column, Antidote. I also was the project editor on the Just One Breath collaborative reporting series.  These days, for the University of Washington, I now work as the Executive Director for Insitutue for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Client Services, a social enterprise. You can follow me on Twitter @wheisel.

Articles

Journal Should Keep Correcting Itself on Conflict of Interest

Nobody wants to show up in a correction. It either means the publication said something wrong about you or that you were the one who erred. If the correction simply says that you “could not be reached or did not respond,” it leaves the impression that you are hiding from something.

Ethics Journal Fixing Disclosure Process to Catch More Conflicts

In one issue of the American Journal of Bioethics, at least six authors had conflicts of interest that went undisclosed. The journal says five others never responded to requests for their potential conflicts of interest for articles in that same November 2010 issue. How did that happen?